It’s been talked about here before, but fundamentally it’s when the advertising guys won the power struggle over the search engine guys. Previously, advertising was a means to fund cool technology (and also get filthy rich).
Now it’s just a way to make the number perpetually go up, sucking every last drop of value out of the system.
Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled.
Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new cars to be equipped with "driver impairment" tech which was called a "kill switch". Media rushed to say it's not really a kill switch, just "sensors or cameras to monitor the driver’s behaviors, head or eye movements" and "block the driver from operating the vehicle". So... a kill switch. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-402773429497
Anyway, I'm staying with my old gas Honda until it dies which is probably never with proper maintenance and eventually restoration. I'll never go electric. Modern cars are just smartphones on wheels at this point, and smartphones are just spying devices at this point.
Tell that to Synapse customers. Many millions of dollars are missing.
Banks have to follow strict rules to account for where all the money goes. But the way fintechs work, they usually just have one or a couple underlying "FBO" accounts where all the pooled money is held, but then the fintech builds a ledger on top of this (and, as the article points out, to varying levels of engineering competence) to track each individual customer's balance within this big pool of money. In Synapse's case, their ledger said the total amount of all of their individual customer balances ended up being much more than the actual funds held in the underlying FBO accounts. Lots of folks are assuming fraud but I'm willing to put money that it was just a shitty, buggy ledger.
FWIW, after seeing "how the sausage is made", I would never put money into a fintech depository account. Use a real bank. Fintechs also often put out the fake promise that deposits are FDIC insured, but this only protects you if the underlying bank goes belly up, not if the fintech loses track of your money.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/zennonkapron/2024/11/08/what-th...
As someone who is coming to increasingly believe that 99% of the world problems are caused by powers seeking to intentionally divide us one from the other, I cannot tell you how much joy this brings me to see. I wish you great success in this effort, however small it might appear to be in the scheme of things.
Statement from the City of London Corporation which is closing them down:
> Chris Hayward, policy chairman of the City of London Corporation, said the > decision represented a "positive new chapter" for the markets as it "empowers > traders to build a sustainable future in premises that align with their > long-term business goals".
This is a great statement. Like firing people to free them up to find jobs that better align with their desire for employment.
They are hardwired on Macbooks. From Daring Fireball, quoting an email from an Apple engineer.
> All cameras after [2008] were different: The hardware team tied the LED to a hardware signal from the sensor: If the (I believe) vertical sync was active, the LED would light up. There is NO firmware control to disable/enable the LED. The actual firmware is indeed flashable, but the part is not a generic part and there are mechanisms in place to verify the image being flashed. […]
> So, no, I don’t believe that malware could be installed to enable the camera without lighting the LED. My concern would be a situation where a frame is captured so the LED is lit only for a very brief period of time.
https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/on_covering_webcams
I thought the whole point of these camera LEDs was to have them wired to/through the power to the camera, so they are always on when the camera is getting power, no matter what.
Having the LED control exposed through the firmware completely defeats this.
Oh boy. Please, please stop using Medium for anything. I have lost count of how many potentially interesting or informative articles are published behind the Medium sign-in wall. At least for me, if you aren't publishing blog articles in public then what's the point of me trying to read them.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I hate “cloud shit”, and a small part of me is convinced that literally no one actually likes it, and everyone is playing a joke on me.
I have set up about a dozen rack mount servers in my life, installing basically every flavor of Unix and Linux and message busses under the sun in the process, but I still get confused by all the Kubectl commands and GCP integration with it.
I might just be stupid, but it feels like all I ever do with Kubernetes is update and break YAML files, and then spend a day fixing them by copy-pasting increasingly-convoluted things on stackexchange. I cannot imagine how anyone goes to work and actually enjoys working in Kubernetes, though I guess someone must in terms of “law of large numbers”.
If I ever start a company, I am going to work my damndest to avoid “cloud integration crap” as possible. Just have a VM or a physical server and let me install everything myself. If I get to tens of millions of users, maybe I’ll worry about it then.
Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to.
If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford and eat it.
> Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society
It's not just a loss for society. It's society-killing.
Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves. It's a ridiculous self-own.
This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a hill for.
It’s not just California, but California may be one of the more egregious state neglecters.
The push at the state level for policies that focus on equality of outcomes over equality of opportunities will not end well for the gifted and talented communities.
Whenever I hear these people talk about their policies, I can’t help but recall Harrison Bergeron.
Focusing on equality of outcomes in a society that structurally does not afford equality of opportunities is a fool’s game that ends with Bergeron-esque levels of absurdity.
Imho, the only viable/main solution is to acknowledge that we all aren’t equal, we don’t all have access to the same opportunities, but as a country we can implement policies that lessen the imbalance.
Head Start is a good example.
Well-run gifted and talented programs in schools are also good examples.
Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society.
>I wonder if you exclude "recalls" resolved by software updates, for all cars, where it would rank then?
Why have you put "recalls" in quotes? It gives the impression you think this makes it somehow lesser. The cybertruck, for example, was subject to a recall because the rearview camera wouldn't come up, but the mirrors are insufficient to back the vehicle up safely without the camera.
That's a safety issue, irrespective of whether or not the fix was in software.
> Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update
Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to how much they "individually" earned the company. Employers strive to pay employees the minimum they can bear, on employer's terms. Those terms are information asymmetry and a Gaussian distribution. Fairness is the last thing one should expect from employers, but being honest about this is not good for morale, so instead, they rely on keeping employees uninformed, while the employers collude to gather everyone's remuneration history via the Work Number.
The second mistake they made is assume that companies would prioritize being lean and trimming the mediocre & bottom 5%. There are other considerations, combined productivity is more important than having individual superstars working on the shiniest features. How much revenue do you think a janitor or café staffer generates? Close to zero. The same goes for engineering. Someone has to do the unglamorous staff, or you end up with a dysfunctional company, with amazing talent (on paper).
Edit: there's an infamous graph that shows when aggregate worker productivity and average income. The two tracked closely, rising in tandem until the 1970s, where they got decoupled. With income becoming much flatter, and productivity continuing to rise. That's how the world has been for the past 50 years on the macro and the micro
It's important to note that the Do-Not-Stab header has been deprecated because one browser engine switched it on by default and requiring users to opt into stabbing hurt the bottom line of the stabbing industry, so it's no longer respected. Luckily someone came up with General Assault Control, a non-standard alternative, which also only has one value, so you can set Sec-GAC to 1 to request websites not to assault you. By design, this header cannot be extended, so it cannot be used to distinguish brutal stabbings from a comedic pie to the face in the future.
Because of legal requirements, the General Assault Control header may not be enabled by default, as American states like Colorado require explicit opt-out (rather than explicit opt-in). This protects Colorado's thriving stabbing and shooting industry as most users will never want to opt into being stabbed.
Despite the feature being forced to be disabled by default, the organisation behind the spec is pushing hard for customers to download fringe browsers that implement the feature (though you may need about:config to enable it). Because of the small user base, the request not to be assaulted can be used by websites not willing to follow the standard to make their stabbings and shootings more precise. End users can request a JSON file from the web server containing the supposed support for the GAC header, but requesting this URL may be used to kick the user in the teeth by non compliant servers.
It’s great satire, but it really does mirror a larger societal shift where the burden of safeguarding personal autonomy has shifted from institutions/regulators to individual users. Do-Not-Stab, Do-Not-Track, whatever it might be, any sort of “voluntary compliance” is a non-starter in the face of financial pressures
IMO we need to start normalizing being militant about this stuff again, to aggressively and adversarially defend the freedom to use your computer the way you choose to use it
I compile a lot of C++ code from a lot of places, and the only time I run into code that somehow simply doesn't work on newer versions of C++ and where the developers aren't even sure if they will accept any patches to fix the issue as they claim it "isn't supported" to use a newer version of C++--even for the public headers of a library--is, you guessed it: code from Google.
Meanwhile, most of the C++ code from Google seems to be written in some mishmash of different ideas, always at some halfway point along a migration between something ancient and something passable... but never anything I would ever dare to call "modern", and thereby tends to be riddled with state machines and manual weak pointers that lead to memory corruption.
So... I really am not sure I buy the entire premise of this article? Honestly, I am extremely glad that Google is finally leaving the ecosystem, as I generally do not enjoy it when Google engineers try to force their ridiculous use cases down peoples' throats, as they seem to believe they simply know better than everyone else how to develop software.
Like... I honestly feel bad for the Rust people, as I do not think the increasing attention they are going to get from Google is going to be at all positive for that ecosystem, any more than I think the massive pressure Google has exerted on the web has been positive or any more than the pressure Google even exerted on Python was positive (not that Python caved to much of it, but the pressure was on and the fact that Python refused to play ball with Google was in no small part what caused Go to exist at all).
(FWIW, I do miss Microsoft's being in the space, but they honestly left years ago -- Herb's existence until recent being kind of a token consideration -- as they have been trying to figure out a tactical exit to C++ ever since Visual J++ and, arguably, Visual Basic, having largely managed to pivot to C# and TypeScript for SDKs long ago. That said... Sun kicking Microsoft out of Java might have been really smart, despite the ramifications?)
I've seen a bit of confusion regarding this. First, it's 10% of Denmark's total land area, which is roughly equivalent to 15% of farmland area. Second, the conversion of farmland area into nature and forests is mainly for improving water quality, as excess nitrogen from agriculture has essentially killed the rivers and coastal waters through oxygen depletion from algae.
Regarding global warming and CO2, the area conversion of peatlands will help, but the major change here is the introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural industry. And to end confusion regarding other emissions than CO2, it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e.
If you'd like to read more, see the two PDF documents below, which are the main official documents. They're in Danish, but upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll have a much better source of information if you'd like to know more about the specifics and how the actual implementation is planned.
[1] https://www.regeringen.dk/media/13261/aftale-om-et-groent-da...
[2] https://mgtp.dk/media/iinpdy3w/aftale_om_implementering_af_e...
Appreciated Daniel reaching out to the team about this! Hosting blobs is one of those things that will inevitably go through iterations as we understand the abuse vectors more and more, but for now it's really fun to see this kind of usage in action. The PDS is meant to be a database host in the same sense that a webserver is a website host.